Attack of the Clones
December 5, 2006 10:51 AM   Subscribe

Dutch artist Bert Simons, suffering from a mid-life crisis, decided to clone himself to become immortal. By means of state-of-the-art computer multiplication techniques he found a way for you to build your own Bert clone! (1.2 MB PDF) He is currently in the process to clone a female specimen. (NSFW: cardboard nudity) [via]
posted by kika (4 comments total)
 
Nice job... I wouldn't have expected how he noticed its comforting to have himself around /see his own image.
posted by uni verse at 11:14 AM on December 5, 2006


He is currently in the process to clone a female specimen. (NSFW: cardboard nudity)

Heh. I've got wood.
posted by hal9k at 11:14 AM on December 5, 2006


My mother and I used to joke about my father cloning himself, on those nights when it seemed unimaginable that there would ever be a life for us without his shadow cast over days.

The first time I met him, he was already beginning to resemble the pile of ashes I would be somberly handed in a quaint urn by an impeccably-dressed undertaker a mere two days later. I couldn't believe that this malevolent force that had been forever present in our lives after my parents divorced could be defeated by something so mundane as cancer - when I was a child, and I heard him screaming epithets into the phone at my mother, it seemed as though nothing less than a bolt of lightning stolen from God's hand could possibly bring peace to our lives. But there he was, lying in a hospital bed hooked up to machines that catalogued his failing body, calmly ticking away on sheets of paper my progress into peace and his progress into death.

Yes, before she passed, my mother had warned me: If there was any possible way to elude death with spite and bile, my father would do it.

I won't lie. In that hospital room, we did not make up. No guts were spilled. He was unconscious from the cocktail of painkillers they were giving him to manage the pain, but I nonetheless leant over his ear and told him this was an injustice. A lingering, painful death was not enough to make up for his life on Earth.

I took the urn from the undertaker and stuck it in a dark corner in a closet, until winter broke and the first rains began to fall, reviving the countryside and bringing flowers vibrantly awake where they had slept beneath the snow and ice for so long. On the very first day of rain, I took his urn out of that closet, and brought it to the middle of a park, where the trees were still skeletons but held the tangible promise of rebirth to come. I let that urn fill with the life-giving rain, and poured the muck on the soil beside the greatest, noblest tree I could find, hoping that somehow, these two things -- the rain that gives life, and the life that seems eternal -- would bring him back, to rise himself from that soil and once again bring suffering and misery to decent people trying to live their lives. My hope was that he would stride out of that green, and re-establish his destructive hold over my life - so that this time, I could make sure that when he died, he died in a way that would have brought justice to my mother.

I hope to Christ nobody ever finds out how to clone people, for the sake of all those who lived as my mother and I.
posted by kfx at 1:12 PM on December 5, 2006 [3 favorites]


Definitely better than the traditional sports-car-and-trophy-wife solution.
posted by ktoad at 2:00 PM on December 5, 2006


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